The Fear of God

Review of The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin
of Life, by Paul Davies (1999)

Phillip E. Johnson

A condensed version of this review essay
was published in the Weekly Standard for March 22, 1999. This is the original manuscript version.

Paul Davies is a professor of mathematical physics, a highly
successful scientific popularizer, and the winner of the 1996
Templeton Prize of over one million dollars for "progress
in religion." He has said in interviews that the book
that set him on his career path was Anglican Bishop John T. Robinson's
Honest to God, a 1960s manifesto of theological liberalism
that also inspired such religious reformers as Episcopal Bishop
John Shelby Spong to attempt to save Christianity by removing
its supernatural elements. Davies explained to one reporter that
"I was drawn to [Robinson's] idea of God as a sort of 'timeless
ground of being' on which the cosmic order is built. Since science
proceeds from the assumption that nature unfailingly obeys rational
mathematical laws, these laws must be rooted in something. But
not a cosmic magician!"

If Bishop Spong means to save Christianity by secularizing
it, Paul Davies wants to save science from the bleak reductionism
encapsulated in physicist Steven Weinberg's oft-quoted remark
that "the more the universe seems comprehensible the more
it seems pointless." He describes his own middle ground
between supernaturalism and materialism as "a vision of a
self-organizing and self- complexifying universe, governed by
ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve towards life and
consciousness." In The Fifth Miracle, Davies
takes this vision from cosmology into evolutionary biology, thus
bringing a fresh viewpoint to a field that has long been dominated
by materialists who insist that no purposeful forces guided
the evolution of life.

The fifth miracle of Davies' title refers to Genesis 1:11:
"Let the Land Produce Vegetation." (The first four Biblical
miracles are the creation of the universe, the creation of light,
the creation of the firmament and the creation of dry land.)
It is proverbial in the popular science publishing world that
God is good for sales, especially since Steven Hawking sold millions
of copies of an otherwise unremarkable book by promising that
a unified physical theory would enable us "to know the mind
of God." Commercial requirements alone seem to have dictated
that word "miracle," since Davies begins the book by
disavowing it. Like other evolutionary scientists he starts with
the presumption that "it is the job of science to solve mysteries
without recourse to divine intervention." Life is not
a miracle because scientists wish it to be a product of natural
forces which they can explain.

If the origin of life was not a miracle, Davies does think
that it was a very mysterious event. Not long ago he thought
that science was close to solving the mystery, but upon investigating
the subject to write this book he became convinced that "we
are missing something fundamental about the whole business."
A satisfactory theory of the origin of life requires not just
more knowledge of the kind we already possess, but "some
radically new ideas." So what is the fundamental thing that
scientists are currently missing, and what kind of radically new
ideas does Davies have in mind?

At the middle of the twentieth century, the reigning belief
was that life began with an immensely improbable chance event.
This view was dramatically stated in a Scientific American
article in 1954 by the Harvard biochemist George Wald. Wald
conceded that the spontaneous generation of something as complex
as a living organism seemed impossible, but he insisted that such
statistical miracles are possible and even probable given enough
time. He estimated that two billion years were available, and he argued that "Given so much time, the 'impossible'
becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually
certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles."

Wald's view that chance and time are all that is necessary
is now out of favor. Today's dominant view is most authoritatively
stated in Nobel laureate Christian de Duve's 1995 book, Vital
Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative (1995). De Duve argues
that life is not the product of chance but of law-driven chemical
steps, each one of which must have been highly probable in the
right circumstances. This reliance upon laws favoring life
is a giant step in the direction Davies wants to go, and
away from the view that the origin of life was a freakish accident unlikely
to occur elsewhere. George Wald's position has dropped from
sight in part because it has become clearer that even the simplest
conceivable life form (still much simpler than any actual organism)
would have to be so complex that accidental self-assembly would
be practically miraculous even in two billion years. (Natural
selection can't help until biological reproduction has started,
a point to which I will return in a moment.) In addition,
the time available for a statistical miracle to occur has been
dramatically shrinking. Evidence of life goes back about
3.8 billion years, almost to a time when conditions on the early
earth were inhospitable for even the hardiest bacteria. If life
evolved in a geological instant, it must have been by law-directed
chemical steps that would be likely to occur again in similar conditions.

That is why many scientists, including both de Duve and Davies,
are confident that some kind of unicellular life (or evidence
of past life) is likely to be found on other planets wherever
conditions are sufficiently favorable. Whether there is any more
extensive "cosmic imperative" that would compel relatively
simple organisms to evolve in the direction of human-style intelligence
is more doubtful. But our own galaxy alone has some 200
billion stars, and if a few million of these have planets bearing
life, there are lots of opportunities for Darwinian evolution
to bring life to a stage of consciousness and intelligence.
Maybe the laws that make primitive life inevitable also make intelligent
life sufficiently likely that the necessary evolutionary steps
would have happened many times.

So far Davies and de Duve are in agreement. They part company
over whether existing chemical laws are sufficient to explain
the origin of life, or whether something essentially different
remains to be discovered. Orthodox prebiological chemists,
including de Duve, see the problem as one of conventional chemistry.
Once the right chemicals are in place at the right time, the necessary reactions inevitably follow and life emerges.
Hence the experiments that seem important to them are ones that
show that some of the necessary chemicals (mainly amino acids)
could have been synthesized on the early earth, or could have
come to this planet on comets or meteorites. They concede that
many of the specific steps leading to life remain to be explained, but they are confident that the picture can be filled
in eventually on the basis of the known laws of chemistry, supplemented
perhaps by chance events that are not forbiddingly unlikely.
Chance and law had to do the whole job, because nothing else was
available.

For Davies, the solution to the riddle of life lies not in
just getting the chemicals together, but in explaining the origin
of the genetic information, which he calls the "software"
of the organism. A living cell is a masterpiece of miniaturized
complexity, and its complex operations are coordinated by a program
or "blueprint" inscribed in the 4-letter chemical alphabet
of the DNA, and then translated into the twenty-letter alphabet
of the proteins. What most needs to be explained is not
the chemicals but the information in the software, just as the important thing about
a computer program or a book is the information content and not
the physical medium in which that information is recorded.
Davies believes that, once the life processes of metabolism and
reproduction are under way, natural selection can supply increases
in information. But metabolism and reproduction can not get started until an enormous amount of complex information
is already in existence. What was the source of the initial
information input?

That genetic information exists, and is enormously complex,
is not controversial. The arch-materialist Richard Dawkins
states, at the beginning of The Blind Watchmaker, that
"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the
appearance of having been designed for a purpose," and that
each cell "contains a digitally coded database larger, in
information content, that all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia
Britannica put together." Materialists assume that
this information is an emergent product of chemistry, and that
it somehow forms when the right chemical combinations get going
from the right combination of chance and law.

Davies says, however, that the leap from chemistry to biology
requires something in addition to chance and law, because of the
fundamentally informational character of life. Law produces
the same simple pattern over and over again. Chance produces
disordered, unspecified sequences that show no consistent patterns.
The problem is that the genetic information, like the information
in Windows 98 or the Bible, is both highly specified and random
(i.e., non-repeating). These characteristics are essential
for any book or program with a high information content, and explain
why the nucleotide sequences of an organism's DNA necessarily
must be independent of any chemical properties that cause the
parts of the molecule to bind together. A book whose letters
reflected only the chemical properties of ink and paper would
express no information beyond what is already contained in the
laws.

The heart of the problem is that physical laws are simple and
general, and by their nature they produce only repetitive order.
Law-governed processes can produce simple repetitious patterns,
as in crystals, but they can't produce the complex, specified
sequences by which the nucleotides of DNA code for proteins --
any more than they can produce the sequence of letters on a page
of the Bible. Random sequences, on the other hand,
are by definition non- patterned. To say in this context
that sequences are random means that they are non-repeating and
hence cannot be produced by a formula such as "do X
over and over again." A random assortment of letters
also contains no significant information unless the sequence is
also specified by some independent requirement. Again, think
of your computer's operating system or the Bible as an example.
Only a very small number of highly specific sequences of
instructions will give you a working program, or an intelligible
Bible. Random deviations from this specified sequence will
introduce disorder, and the situation will only be worse if you
add recurring patters of mindless repetitions governed by invariable
laws.

In short, meaningful sequences require some third force that
works both against repetitive order on the one hand, and chaotic
chance on the other. Mixing the two together just gives us the
worst of both worlds. Here is a pastiche of Davies' sentences
from his concluding chapter to give a flavor of the kind of third
force he has in mind:

"A law of nature of the sort we know and love will not
create biological information, or indeed any information at all.
(210) ... The whole point of the genetic code, for example, is
to free life from the shackles of non-random chemical bonding.
(211) ... The key step that was taken on the road to biogenesis
was the transition from a state in which molecules slavishly
follow mundane chemical pathways, to one in which they
organize themselves to follow their own pathways. (211)
... Once this essential point is grasped, the real problem of biogenesis is
clear. Since the heady success of molecular biology, most
investigators have sought the secret of life in the physics and
chemistry of molecules. But they will look in vain for
conventional physics and chemistry to explain life, for this
is a classic case of confusing the medium with the message.
The secret of life lies, not in its chemical basis, but in the
logical and informational rules it exploits. (212) ...
Real progress with the mystery of biogenesis will be made, I
believe, not through exotic chemistry, but from something conceptually
new. (216)."

But exactly what is this "something conceptually new?"
Davies understood that many scientists would think he was describing
"a miracle in nature's clothing." He appealed
to de Duve himself for protection, saying that "Deterministic
thinking, even in the weaker forms of de Duve and [Stuart] Kauffmann,
represents a fundamental challenge to the existing scientific
paradigm.... Although biological determinists strongly deny that
there is any actual design, or predetermined goal, involved in
their proposals, the idea that the laws of nature may be slanted
towards life, while not contradicting the letter of Darwinism,
certainly offends its spirit. It slips an element of teleology
back into nature, a century and a half after Darwin banished it."
(218-219).

I heard Davies present this thesis at a scientific conference
in Italy in September 1998, at which Christian de Duve and I were
also participants. I thought Davies had walked right up
to the brink of saying that an intelligent agent had participated
in the origin of life, and evidently de Duve thought so too.
He accosted Davies immediately afterwards, and continued with
probing questions into the evening. De Duve, as remorseless
in his logic as he was courteous in his manner, asked Davies if
he was implying that information came first, and chemistry only thereafter.
Davies answered that no, he didn't mean that.* So it seemed
that chemical laws created the information after all. De
Duve continued: "You are reviving vitalism and [Aristotelian]
final causes!" Again, Davies again pleaded not guilty.
He assured de Duve that he hadn't really meant that the new laws
would contradict the existing laws. After a lot more of
this de Duve smiled benignly and said "I must have misunderstood
you."

Put to the test, it seemed that Davies was harmless after all.
All his revolutionary talk just meant that we don't have all the
answers yet, which is what de Duve and the orthodox people have
been saying all along. Everybody agrees that new knowledge is
needed. The argument Davies had seemed to be making was
that we need to discover some fundamentally new
third factor that is beyond both chance and law. Then he
seemed to flinch when he contemplated the consequences of his
own logic. He was caught between what he wanted to say (chance
and law aren't enough) and what he didn't quite dare to say (something
beyond chance and law had to be involved). His awkward solution
was to call the necessary third entity another kind of "law,"
even though he acknowledged that it would have to be something
fundamentally different from anything previously known as a law.

One reason Davies had to retreat was that he risked being labeled
as a vitalist or even as a creationist. It is tolerable
for a cosmologist to say that the laws of physics are rooted in
some rational principle, because that implies only a deism that
leaves the laws inviolate after the ultimate beginning.
It is quite another thing to say that some information-creating
intelligence was involved in the origin of life, billions of years
after the Big Bang. Regardless of any disclaimers Davies
might make, an intelligent force which operates in the history of life would
be seen by scientific materialists as a cosmic magician and by
the conventionally religious as the God of the Bible.

Davies also had a scientific reason for hesitating to commit
himself to the need for a third factor. He believes that evolutionary
biologists have proved that, once the life process has somehow
been jump-started, the Darwinian mechanism can do all rest of
the information-building. If that is true, then it is reasonable
to agree with de Duve that there must be some quasi-Darwinian
process operating in the prebiotic environment. Quoting
again from The Fifth Miracle:

"Can specific randomness be the guaranteed product of
a deterministic, mechanical, law-like process, like a primordial
soup left to the mercy of familiar laws of physics and chemistry?
No it couldn't.... If you have found the foregoing argument persuasive,
you may be forgiven for concluding that a genome really is a
miraculous object. However, most of the problems I have outlined
above apply with equal force to the evolution of the genome over
time. In this case we have a ready-made solution to the
puzzle, called Darwinism. Random mutations plus natural
selection are one sure-fire way to generate biological information,
extending a short random genome over time into a long random
genome. Chance in the guise of mutations and law in the guise
of selection form just the right combination of randomness and
order needed to created 'the impossible object.' The necessary
information comes, as we have seen, from the environment. (P.
89)

That amounts to saying that the law/chance combination can
do the job after all when the package is labeled Darwinism, and
that the Darwinian magician can draw the informational rabbit
out of the environmental hat when the rabbit never was in the
hat in the first place! We are entitled to ask for experimental
confirmation of so marvelous a tale, and of course it won't be
forthcoming. The standard examples of Darwinism-in-action
involve only cyclical variations in fundamentally stable populations
of peppered moths and finches. Random mutation is typically an
information- reducing entity, even if there are rare exceptions.
Some mutations are fitness enhancing, to be sure, as when a bacterium
becomes resistant to an antibiotic, but this does not necessarily
mean that they increase genetic information. Lee Spetner's book
Not By Chance (Judaica Press 1998) explains that a mutations
that causes a bacterium to become resistant to streptomycin, for
example, is information-reducing. It disables a site on
a ribosome where the drug normally attaches, and so the drug molecule
can no longer do its damage to the bacterium. By analogy,
a random change in an elaborate computer program might on rare
occasions improve the computer's performance; if it disabled some feature that was causing trouble in
a particular environment. But that is not how computers
and their software are built up in the first place. In fact biologists
believe in the creative power of the mutation/selection mechanism
for exactly the same reason that prebiological chemists like de
Duve believe that chemical reactions can create genetic information.
They are philosophical materialists, and identify science with
that philosophy, and so they assume that nothing other than law
and chance was available to do all the creating that had to be
done.

One reason that many scientists think that "materialism"
and "science" are just two words for the same thing
is that they assume that the only alternative to law and chance
is miracle, by which they mean a cosmic magician's arbitrary interference
with the stately order of natural law. But why should they assume
that? If we go back to the computer and its software as
an example, it is evident that intelligent design is also part
of the natural order. A computer does not operate by magic,
nor does it contravene the laws of physics and chemistry.
Its operations are within the laws and as predictable as other
systems which scientists study, even though a computer does not
come into existence until an intelligent entity designs its hardware
and software. If genetic information is comparable to software,
it must be designed by an entity with the capability of a software
designer. That's just a fact, and science doesn't progress
by denying facts in order to take refuge in comfortable philosophical
assumptions.

Even the most unyielding Darwinists seem to have some sense
that their biological mechanism is inadequate. In his 1998
book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins castigates
his rival Stephen Jay Gould for misleading the public by using
"bad poetry" to describe evolution. Yet Dawkins
himself employs dubious metaphors to make his points, especially
when he tries to illustrate the power of natural selection
by comparing it to a computer running a program. He does
this most famously in Chapter Three of The Blind Watchmaker,
where he explains how a computer can write a text of Shakespeare
by selecting the right letters from a random array. Many lesser
science writers have followed his example. I found a succinct
version of this bad poetry recently in an article by the science
editor of the London Guardian, announcing a public lecture by
Dawkins:

"Churchmen used to argue that self-creating life was
as likely as a monkey randomly batting typewriter keys and typing
out the Bible without a mistake. But think of monkeys and typewriters
Darwin's way, says Professor Cesare Emiliani of Miami. It might
take a monkey an eternity to type the 6 million characters of
the Bible by chance, but suppose natural selection were a rubber
that erased each mistyped letter - or each unsatisfactory mutation
- immediately? Assume 13 mistakes for each successful letter,
and at the rate of a keystroke per second, you could have the
whole of Holy Writ in 13 times 6 million seconds, or two and
a half years." [Tim Radford, "And Darwin created us all.
. .;" The Guardian (London), February 6, 1999, P.
1.]

Of course this absurdity has nothing to do with the natural
selection known to biologists, which amounts to nothing more than
the unremarkable observation that organisms may fail to leave
viable offspring due to genetic inadequacies, in which case the
"bad genes" will tend to disappear from the population.
Darwin made the observation remarkable by calling it "selection,"
a metaphor which misleadingly suggests intelligent choice. Metaphor
aside, death and sterility do not create genetic information or write Bibles. Professor Emiliani's "eraser" would have
to be a computer with the Bible already in its memory, so it could
compare the letters typed by the monkey with those in its copy
of the Bible to see which letters were correct. It could
more easily dispense with the sham of the random letters and just
find the file and hit the "print" key. The hero
of the story is not the monkey or the piece of rubber, but the
software designer, who put the Bible in the eraser's memory and
programmed it with the ability to spot the meaning an apparently
meaningless letter would eventually have when the rest of the
text was in place. Attributing all opposition to the Darwinian
scenario to "churchmen," by the way, is an all-too-typical
Darwinian appeal to prejudice.

When used to demonstrate what natural selection can do, the
analogy to a computer is either a howler or a fraud. I don't
say that in order to complain, but to point out why Darwinists
have to resort to such bad poetry to defend their system.
The reason is that, once the problem of biological evolution is
framed as "information creation" rather than "variation
within the type," the inadequacy of the peppered moth and
finch beak examples is glaringly obvious. Computers with
intelligently designed programs become the basis of thought-experiments,
because the Darwinists at some level understand that their mechanism
cannot do the necessary information-creating unless it has the
capabilities of Professor Emiliani's eraser.

I hope that Paul Davies will think again about how the materialists
have misled him, and find the courage to follow his own insights
to their logical conclusion. Law and chance are not enough
to create the thing that makes life what it is, which is the software
bearing the information. A third factor is needed. Whether
we call it "intelligence" or find some euphemism like
"new laws," the third factor has to have the capacities
we normally associate with intelligence. If the materialists
want to believe that a mechanism involving only law and chance can do the job,
they have every right to try to pursue a research strategy based
on that belief. But science does not mean believing what
you want to believe, or holding fast to a philosophy regardless
of the evidence. It means having the boldness to follow the
trail of the evidence, even if it threatens to lead you into unfamiliar
territory.

* But maybe he did mean just that.
In his article "Bit before it?" (New Scientist, January
30, 1999, Pg. 3), Davies wrote that "Normally we think of
the world as composed of simple, clod-like, material particles,
and information as a derived phenomenon attached to special, organised
states of matter. But maybe it is the other way around: perhaps
the Universe is really a frolic of primal information, and material
objects a complex secondary manifestation."